Month: March, 2017

I was listening to Mel Robbins give her TED talk on the five-second rule, rubber gloves on and freezer door hanging open. I had a metal spatula in one hand and was doing what every household expert says never to do – attack ice in the freezer with a metal object. ‘Why is it’, Mel Robbins was saying, as ice came out in pleasing chunks, ‘that we are unable to get ourselves to do the little things that would make such a difference to our lives?’ Yes, I wondered, why is that?

Less than a minute into the talk it struck me. ‘Damn it’, I thought. Not only had Mel Robbins launched an entire media career on the strength of a glitch in human nature. Even worse, she had nailed it. Thanks to her rule I was able to do something that I’d ordinarily avoid like the plague – defrost the freezer – simply by counting back from five to zero and opening the freezer door.

Repacking the contents of the freezer, labeling containers and diverting old food to compost, a small ziplock bag slipped through my fingers and fell to the floor. Next to my shoe was Eric, the goldfish I’d put in a plastic bag the weekend before after finding him dead in my daughter’s fish-tank while she was away.

Perfectly preserved in a ziplock bag Eric stared at me. This was the goldfish that had kept my daughter company from a corner of her bedroom for four years, his long swirling tail now curled into the corner of the bag. He had watched over my daughter through good times and bad, surviving his mate by a year, before awaiting his fate in the freezer.

When I brought up the idea of burying Eric in the garden, as with previous goldfish, my daughter shrugged. ‘He was old anyway’, she said flatly. ‘I knew he would die soon’. The moment she said this I felt sad. Because I knew that the younger more sentimental side of my daughter wasn’t listening. Given the pressure she felt under in her final year of school I knew that she couldn’t afford to be upset by the death of her goldfish.

As I picked up the compost bin to take it outside my hand slipped in, retrieved Eric the goldfish and put him back in the freezer, thinking quietly to myself that on the weekend I would use the five-second rule for his burial.

A week ago our dog ripped out a claw playing soccer on the back lawn, requiring a trip to the vet. The vet bandaged her up and sent her home with three days’ worth of painkillers. When, while I was there, I mentioned our dog had gut issues, the vet suggested that I try wetting her dry food to ease her digestion. The next day the combined effect of the painkillers and wettened food weakened our dog’s muscles, causing her to wee and poo on the rug in my husband’s study. Luckily I was the first to smell the mess – late for the school run – and cleaned it up before my husband found it.

A few days later our dog wee’d and poo’d on my husband’s study rug a second time. I had just started working when a call came through from my husband, a stressy call in which we talked through the best way to clean up his carpet. Yesterday I got another call. This time I felt in two minds about answering. ‘Don’t worry’, he said. ‘It’s the dog again but I’m fine. I’m just calling to let off steam’.

On returning from my daughter’s sailing, later in the day, I noted the study door was closed and breathed a sigh of relief. An hour later my husband came in from tennis with the news that the lock in his study door had broken. Fired up from sailing my daughter headed down to the basement and returned with a few tools. She jiggled and poked the lock but to no avail. She returned to the basement and came back with a power drill and goggles. ‘This is going to be messy’, she said. ‘Don’t worry’, I replied. ‘It has to be done’.

Holding the drill firm my daughter cut a large square out of the wooden panel, allowing her to reach through the door to try the handle from the other side. ‘It’s no good’, she called. ‘The lock is broken on the inside’. This time she made a small rectangular cut around the lock, spraying wood as she went, watched by our dog from a safe distance. Then she pushed the whole square, with the lock inside it, on to the floor. As expected, our dog had made another mess on the rug, which I promptly cleaned up. Bringing the lock into the kitchen my daughter took it apart on the table, prising out the broken piece and putting it in a zip-lock bag with blackened fingers, and saying something about mending it with the school welder. Perhaps, I thought to myself, my daughter really can fix the broken lock. Or perhaps she can’t.

A week slips by, an eventful crushing school week during which there is no mention of the lock, safe in its zip-lock bag in the bottom of my daughter’s schoolbag. All week long I keep a wary eye on our dog who has clearly decided that it’s okay to relieve herself in my husband’s study, the door to which now can’t be shut.

A few years ago my husband would have jumped up and down at the annoyance of it all. A few years ago he would have sworn at our dog. A few years ago I would have tactlessly asked if the hundred-and-fifty year old lock in my husband’s study door had broken as he slammed the door shut. A few years ago my husband and I would have wrangled over what to do about his stained carpet, undeclared affect sticking to our every word. But actually for a whole week neither of us has mentioned the broken lock or the stained carpet or for that matter the holes in his study door. While this might suggest maturity, I rather think that it reflects our unspoken acceptance of the messiness of things.